This is Monocle on Design Extra.
It's a short show to accompany our weekly program where we discuss everything from architecture and graphics to furniture and craft.
I'm Mailie Evans.
Lester Beale is best known for his key contributions to the modernist graphic design movement in the United States.
Developing corporate identities, editorial advertising and packaging in the 1950s and 60s.
One of his earlier and perhaps lesser known projects includes a series of posters developed in the 1930s for the Rural Electrification Administration or the REA.
These posters translated European modernism for a rural US audience.
And these designs are the focal point of a current exhibition at the Poster House in New York City.
With more, here's Angelina Lippert, executive director and curator at Poster House.
We actually start off the show with a poster to using as a counterpoint to his design.
The majority, and obviously no single artist is siloed like there were other modernists working in America at that time.
But by and large, American commercial poster advertising was generally illustrational, very realistic.
The poster we start off with is a poster for electrification, but it was printed by General Electric and it just shows like a bucolic landscape somewhere in America.
It's a vista coming out of like commercial train advertising, like that type of travel advertising that was very popular in the 1920s and 30s in the United States.
Beale is decidedly breaking away from that into something incredibly modern.
Build a 3 series for the Rural Electrification Administration.
Spaced a few years apart, the series had a twofold purpose.
It went around the country to convince Americans to self invest in creating co ops for electricity.
At this point in time when these posters debuted, 90% of the United States did not have access to electricity.
We were devastatingly behind and by the end of this campaign we're looking at almost 75% of the country having access to electricity.